The Republic of the Imagination

Azar Nafisi is the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, which portrays the Islamic revolution in Iran and its harrowing effects on this university professor and her students.  An incisive exploration of the transformative powers of fiction in a world of tyranny, the book spent more than 117 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, has been translated in 32 languages, and has won diverse literary awards, including the 2004 Non-fiction Book of the Year Award from Booksense, the Frederic W. Ness Book Award, the 2004 Latifeh Yarsheter Book Award, an achievement award from the American Immigration Law Foundation, and the 2006 Persian Golden Lioness Award for literature.

Ms. Nafisi directs the Dialogue Project at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. A professor of aesthetics, culture, and literature at Johns Hopkins, she has held a fellowship at Oxford University and taught at the University of Tehran, the Free Islamic University, and Allameh Tabatabai. She has also earned international respect for advocating on behalf of Iran’s intellectual youth, especially young women.

Ms. Nafisi’s other writings include Anti-Terra: A Critical Study of Vladimir Nabokov’s Novels as well as a children’s book, BiBi and the Green Voice. She has contributed new introductions to the Modern Library Classics edition of Tolstoy’s Hadji Murad and to Iraj Pezeshkzad’s My Uncle Napoleon and has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal.

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